The last coal-fired power station in the UK will close down on Sept 30. Coal literally fueled the Industrial Revolution in the UK and now it’s all but vanished from the country.
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Entries for September 2024
David Attenborough on Cybertruck behavior. “Here we see the Cybertruck has formed a peculiar symbiotic relationship with the larger Flatbed Trailer species.”
The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time
From the staff at Rolling Stone, a list of the all-time best 100 episodes of TV. The rules: 1 episode per show, no reality (or talk shows or news or sketch comedy), and it’s mostly American shows (but, come on, no episodes of Fawlty Towers?)
I cannot help it, I love lists like these; here are a few of my favorites from the larger collection:
86. Black Mirror, “San Junipero” (Season 3, Episode 4)
83. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Excuse” (Season 4, Episode 24)
73. The Good Place, “Michael’s Gambit” (Season 1, Episode 13)
53. Six Feet Under, “Everyone’s Waiting” (Season 5, Episode 12)
50. The Last of Us, “Long Long Time” (Season 1, Episode 3)
38. The Bear, “Forks” (Season 2, Episode 7)
31. Deadwood, “Sold Under Sin” (Season 1, Episode 12)
25. Homicide: Life on the Street, “Three Men and Adena” (Season 1, Episode 6)
24. Fleabag, “Episode 1” (Season 2, Episode 1)
20. The Americans, “The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears” (Season 4, Episode 8)
14. Succession, “Connor’s Wedding” (Season 4, Episode 3)
12. The Wire, “Middle Ground” (Season 3, Episode 11)
6. Mad Men, “The Suitcase” (Season 4, Episode 7)
5. Seinfeld, “The Contest” (Season 4, Episode 10)
2. The Simpsons, “Last Exit to Springfield” (Season 4, Episode 17)
So much to agree and disagree with here. Thoughts? Also: television!
A Navajo Weaving of an Intel Pentium Processor
In 1994, a Navajo/Diné weaver named Marilou Schultz made a weaving of the microscopic pattern of an Intel Pentium processor. (In the image above, the weaving is on the left and the chip is on the right.)
The Pentium die photo below shows the patterns and structures on the surface of the fingernail-sized silicon die, over three million tiny transistors. The weaving is a remarkably accurate representation of the die, reproducing the processor’s complex designs. However, I noticed that the weaving was a mirror image of the physical Pentium die; I had to flip the rug image below to make them match. I asked Ms. Schultz if this was an artistic decision and she explained that she wove the rug to match the photograph. There is no specific front or back to a Navajo weaving because the design is similar on both sides,3 so the gallery picked an arbitrary side to display. Unfortunately, they picked the wrong side, resulting in a backward die image.
Schultz is working on a weaving of another chip, the Fairchild 9040, which was “built by Navajo workers at a plant on Navajo land”.
In December 1972, National Geographic highlighted the Shiprock plant as “weaving for the Space Age”, stating that the Fairchild plant was the tribe’s most successful economic project with Shiprock booming due to the 4.5-million-dollar annual payroll. The article states: “Though the plant runs happily today, it was at first a battleground of warring cultures.” A new manager, Paul Driscoll, realized that strict “white man’s rules” were counterproductive. For instance, many employees couldn’t phone in if they would be absent, as they didn’t have telephones. Another issue was the language barrier since many workers spoke only Navajo, not English. So when technical words didn’t exist in Navajo, substitutes were found: “aluminum” became “shiny metal”. Driscoll also realized that Fairchild needed to adapt to traditional nine-day religious ceremonies. Soon the monthly turnover rate dropped from 12% to under 1%, better than Fairchild’s other plants.
The whole piece is really interesting and demonstrates the deep rabbit hole awaiting the curious art viewer. (via waxy)
Atul Gawande: Tuberculosis is still the world’s #1 infectious disease killer (1+ million people per year) but “the are new advances in screening, prevention and treatment, however, that now make significant progress possible — if we tap them.”
New School Year Drop-Off and Pick-Up Rules. “Approach the White Zone at exactly 2.6 mph. Staff are standing by to launch your student into the window, Dukes of Hazzard style, with a trebuchet handmade by the LARP Club.”
America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny. “Few things symbolize our national dysfunction more than the inability to stop minting this worthless currency.” It costs 3 cents to make a penny. 🙃
The District Sleeps Alone Tonight (Sylvan Esso Remix)
Here’s a newly released remix of The Postal Service’s The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by Sylvan Esso. In addition to YouTube, it’s also available on several other sites. (via sippey)
Even if autonomous vehicles work perfectly, they will likely not decrease emissions or crash deaths because so many more people will use them. “How do people respond when an activity becomes less onerous and more fun? They do more of it.”
Why TV Is Wrong for Tolkien
Amazon’s series The Rings of Power hasn’t gotten great reviews and Evan Puschak hypothesizes that, unlike movies, TV is not the right medium to tell Tolkien’s stories.
I’m skeptical that the Lord of the Rings, or any other story from Tolkien’s mythology, can really work as a TV series. It’s a square peg round hole situation. TV as a form just doesn’t play to the strengths of Tolkien’s vision.
I’d missed that Ray Nayler, author of the excellent The Mountain in the Sea, came out with a short novel earlier this year called The Tusks of Extinction. “Now, her digitized consciousness has been downloaded into the mind of a mammoth.”
Is My Blue Your Blue? A visual perception test that judges what you call blue and green and compares it with others’ results. I am “bluer than 68% of the population.” Now do red/pink, red/orange, and blue/purple!
Colossal, one of my all-time favorite sites on these here interwebs, has launched a spiffing new redesign. Go take a look.
Can AI Make Art?
Ted Chiang with a thought-provoking essay on Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art:
It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.
In the past few years, Chiang has written often about the limitations of LLMs — you can read more about his AI views on kottke.org.
What are we going to do with abundant, free, renewable energy? “[By 2030] solar power will be absolutely and reliably free during the sunny parts of the day for much of the year ‘pretty much everywhere.’”
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